What has the Sitemaps team been up to since we announced sitemaps.org? We've been busy trying to get Sitemaps adopted by everyone and to make the submission process as easy and automated as possible. To that end, we have three new announcements to share with you.

First, we're making the sitemaps.org site available in 18 languages! We know that our users are located all around the world and we want to make it easy for you to learn about Sitemaps, no matter what language you speak. Here is a link to the Sitemap protocol in Japanese and the FAQ in German.

Second, it's now easier for you to tell us where your Sitemaps live. We wondered if we could make it so easy that you wouldn't even have to tell us and every other search engine that supports Sitemaps. But how? Well, every website can have a robots.txt file in a standard location, so we decided to let you tell us about your Sitemap in the robots.txt file. All you have to do is add a line like

Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

to your robots.txt file. Just make sure you include the full URL, including the http://. That's it. Of course, we still think it's useful to submit your Sitemap through Webmaster tools so you can make sure that the Sitemap was processed without any issues and you can get additional statistics about your site

Last but not least, Ask.com is now also supporting the Sitemap protocol. And with the ability to discover your Sitemaps from your robots.txt file, Ask.com and any other search engine that supports this change to robots.txt will be able to find your Sitemap file.